News Reporter: "Leaks are real, news is fake"? Fact-checking 15 claims from Trump’s news conference

The truth behind the rhetoric

Fact-checking 15 claims from Trump’s news conference (yes, the one where he said “Leaks are real, news is fake”)

President Trump held a lengthy news conference this week, chock full of dubious claims, false statements and inaccurate information. We live fact-checked 15 dubious claims from his news conference. Here are some of the lowlights. For more, read the full round-up.

"We got 306 [electoral college votes] because people came out and voted like they've never seen before, so that's the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan."

This statement is wrong on several levels.

Trump ended up with 304 electoral votes, because two electors he earned voted for someone else.

Trump did get more raw votes than any other Republican candidate in history — but he also earned 2.9 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. Another 8 million people voted for third-party or write-in candidates. Moreover, turnout of the voting-age population (54.6 percent) was lower than in the elections of 2012, 2008 and 2004.

Finally, Trump was wrong on the size of his electoral college win. Of the nine presidential elections since 1984, Trump's electoral college win ranks seventh. When a reporter pointed out his error, Trump first indicated that he was talking about Republican candidates. But George H.W. Bush received 426 electoral votes in 1988. Trump's response: "I don't know, I was given that information."

Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we’ll check it out.

"We had a very smooth rollout of the travel ban. But we had a bad court. Got a bad decision."

Trump appears to have forgotten that imprecise wording in the executive order led to confusion over whether U.S. permanent residents — green-card holders — were also banned from returning to the United States. The White House counsel later issued guidance making clear that they were not covered. The Court of Appeals later said that the counsel's statement was not a sufficient fix.

"You know, they say I'm close to Russia. Hillary Clinton gave away 20 percent of the uranium in the United States. She's close to Russia."

Trump repeated this claim, worthy of Four Pinocchios, several times during the news conference.

An entire chapter is dedicated to this uranium deal in Peter Schweizer's "Clinton Cash." In the book, Schweizer reveals ties between the Clinton Foundation and investors who stood to gain from a deal that required State Department approval.

Trump's claim suggests the State Department had sole approval authority, but the department is one of nine agencies in the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States to vet and sign off on all U.S. transactions involving foreign governments. As we've noted before, there is no evidence Clinton herself got involved in the deal personally, and it is highly questionable that this deal even rose to the level of the secretary of state. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission also needed to approve, and did approve, the transfer.

"We had to go quicker than we thought because of the bad decision we received from a circuit that has been overturned at a record number. I have heard 80 percent."

Trump is referring to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled against reinstating his travel ban. But there are other ways to slice the data, and it's important to put this number into context. None of the data supports Trump's contention that the court is "in chaos" and "in turmoil."

Each court's reversal rate changes every year, so it's easy to cherry-pick this data. Under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the 9th Circuit court did not set a "record" for reversals. The 9th Circuit's reversal rate was usually higher than the average, but not always the highest. In the 2014-2015 term, the 9th Circuit's reversal rate was 63 percent, below the average rate of 72 percent. In the 2015-2016 term, the latest year of data available, the 9th Circuit court's reversal rate was 80 percent, and the average rate was 67 percent.

Most cases that are reviewed by the Supreme Court are reversed. For this reason, a 2010 analysis by the American Bar Association also looked at the number of cases reversed in each appellate court compared to the total number of cases terminated by the appellate court. From 1999 to 2008, 80 percent of 9th Circuit court cases reviewed by the Supreme Court were reversed (compared to the median rate of 68.3 percent). But the number of reversed cases represented only one-fifteenth of 1 percent of the total number of appeals terminated by the 9th Circuit Court during that 10-year period.

Moreover, the 9th Circuit rules on more cases in general. According to SCOTUSblog: "Far more cases come to the Court from the Ninth Circuit than any other court, and — not surprisingly — Ninth Circuit rulings make up a sizeable portion of the docket of argued and decided cases — 75 cases, or 25.7% for the last four Terms including the current session."

"Nobody mentions that Hillary received the questions to the debates."

Trump overstates the disclosure about Clinton reportedly getting a single debate question. During the Democratic primaries, a debate was held in Flint, Mich., to focus on the water crisis. Donna Brazile, then an analyst with CNN, sent an email to the Clinton campaign saying that a woman with a rash from lead poisoning was going to ask what Clinton as president could do the help the people of Flint.

There's no indication Clinton was told this information, but in any case it's a pretty obvious question for a debate being held in Flint. In her answer, Clinton committed to remove lead from water systems across the country within five years. Lee-Anne Waters, who asked the question, later said Clinton's answer "made me vomit in my mouth" because that was too long to wait in Flint.

(giphy.com)

Trump’s claim that there is ‘tremendous amount of increase’ in autism

In a meeting with educators this week, Trump claimed that autism is seeing a “tremendous amount of increase.” This is especially noteworthy, because Trump wants to create a vaccine safety commission that could roll back vaccine laws based on the widely discredited theory that vaccines cause autism. Since as early as 2012, Trump has falsely claimed there is a vaccine-autism link.

There are too many unknown factors to say that Autism Spectrum Disorder is truly on the rise. The number of cases has increased since 2000, but it's unclear how much of a role greater awareness, early detection and changes in the definition of autism contributed to that increase. More disorders were added to the autism spectrum over the past three decades, so it’s problematic to compare autism rates over time.

About one in 68 children in the country has been identified with an Autism Spectrum Disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control's 2016 report. That was the same rate as 2014 — just after a new, broader definition of autism was released. That's about all we know so far. Trump characterized it as an increasingly common disorder, but there's not enough research and no medical consensus as to whether autism is on the rise. We award Trump Three Pinocchios.

Help us find some non-Trump fact-checks.

Our inbox is full of reader requests for Trump fact-checks. Of course we will continue to hold Trump and the administration accountable. But we’re ready for a change in our fact-checking diet. So, if you come across any non-Trump claims, send them over. Use the submission form or email us at factchecker@washpost.com.

ezgif.com-c25482f4ea

We’re always looking for suggestions. If you hear something fact-checkable, fill out this form, e-mail us or tweet us: @myhlee, @GlennKesslerWP or using #FactCheckThis. Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter.

Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio roundup.

— Michelle Ye Hee Lee